Keeping Visual Effects in Los Angeles

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We would like to take this opportunity to clarify further on the goals of this blog, and we believe, the movement in general.

This is not Anti-anybody.

No one thinks that London is full of lesser artists, or that New York is somehow riddled with incapable maroons. This is merely about promoting where the American film industry resides. We would like to see Los Angeles stay the hub of visual effects for American Cinema.

Organizing VFX talent and reducing or eliminating subsidies should be the goal of every artist and supervisor. Otherwise, nowhere is safe. No one is angry at New Mexico for offering really attractive offers… they are angry at New Mexico for stopping the offers and killing the industry where people bought houses and moved their families.

There is a fair amount of reward for people in New York, New Zealand, Vancouver, and Singapore. It seems like the gold will never leave. That there will be a glut of work for decades to come. It felt like that here in Los Angeles 8 to 10 years ago. When people flocked here from all over the US and other countries. We can tell you from experience that it does dry up.

This is why, while it feels protectionist, it is not. This movement is not an ANTI movement. We are a team. We are like minded, hard working professionals and students of every walk of life who dream of a better life making great imagery. We want fairness in pay, and options for our futures. We want the ability to settle down and live lives of success and challenges. None of us are averse to hard work.

VFX Los Angeles supports VFX artists. Period. The focus is to bring it back to profitability and to bring a once vibrant industry back to Los Angeles and be a partner with other states and countries. This train needs a conductor. For American film, that is Los Angeles. For UK film, that is probably London. For Asian film, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. For Canadian film, Vancouver and Montreal. We all have our markets. Let us grow those markets. Let us work together.

We challenge other voices to start a VFX Vancouver blog or a VFX Sinagpore blog. Bring the voices together and help end any us versus them, and let us all make great movies and television, great commercials and trade projects.

Why get your visual effects done in LA? Isn’t it all leaving for Vancouver, London, and New York?

Quite simply, it’s quality, speed, interaction with the team. With all of the major American studios being located in a 20 mile radius, and most of them in a 4 mile radius, it is really easy to justify having more, not less, visual effect artisans and studios in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, home to American film and television, accounts for a great deal of the economy in Southern California. It has a rich history full of experienced professionals who all learned from ‘someone who came before them.’ This is the power of the Los Angeles market, and to a similar degree, the San Francisco area. The people who invented the techniques and workflows that are so common today, did so while learning how to do it on scale and on budget needed for some of the biggest block busters in history.

It is this legacy that has translated down generations of artists and makes the quality second to none. Most of the artists that come to Los Angeles come to learn how to be great artists. They work in a competitive market and work with some of the best existing talent on the planet. This isn’t the case in the other markets and countries that now host a number of larger projects and production houses. Many other VFX communities have to work on developing their own workflows in their own ways that sometimes aren’t as successful. They have to import Americans, or Los Angeles natives to try and teach them how to be successful. At the end of the day, many productions are brought back to Los Angeles to save at the last minute because the work done elsewhere wasn’t the quality that the studio was used to.

The argument that we put forth is that it isn’t worth leaving the comfort of your own community of talent to get the work done. There is still an enormous talent pool here that can be drawn on to get top notch work done for the budget required by productions. Of course there are still giants like ILM and DD that will drive innovation and come up with the ‘next big thing’, but for the bread and butter effects required for features and television, the talent is here. The talent is more than qualified, and the talent is affordable.

Started and maintained by VFX artists in Los Angeles, for the sole purpose of promoting the visual effects industry in Southern California and an attempt to reign in runaway visual effects production to other states and countries by focusing on quality and affordability of local talent.

This blog will focus on work done here by local artists and local companies, striving to provide effects of the highest caliber without resorting to sending work over seas and to Canada.